The amount of data available to information seekers has grown astronomically, whether as the result of the proliferation of information sources on the Internet, or as a result of private efforts to organize business information within a company, or any of a variety of other causes. As the amount of available data grows, so does the need to be able to categorize or label that data so that the data may be more efficiently searched. One approach is to use tagging for this task.
Tagging is the process of adding or attaching metadata such as descriptive attributes to a data object. A tag may be thought of as a category name. As used herein, a data object may be any type of data (e.g., a website, a text file, an image or a Word document). Operating systems, search mechanisms and filtering mechanisms may utilize tags to organize, sort or filter data objects. A taxonomy or system of classification may be defined by a set of tags and their relationships.
Tagging has become prevalent on the Internet as a means for organizing, and identifying relevant websites, articles and other data objects. Internet services allow users to apply tags to websites, photographic images, articles and the like. Tagging provides users with the ability to classify data objects both for their own use and for use by others. Popular web sites such as Flickr™ and del.icio.us allow users to tag and share photographic images and websites with communities of users.
Tagging is also useful within the context of a single client and allows the user to organize data within the client. For example, a user may store a collection of photographic images on the client. The user may apply the tag “vacation” to photographs taken while on holiday and “graduation” to photographs from graduation day. By sorting the photographs by the tags, the user is able to retrieve the appropriate photographs quickly and efficiently without having to view irrelevant and/or unwanted photographs.
In general, a user may use one or more taxonomies for various websites or web services and a separate taxonomy or taxonomies for a client computer. However, utilizing separate taxonomies makes it difficult for the user to maintain consistent organization of relevant data objects. Slight variations in tag names may result in users being unable to locate relevant information. For example, a user may apply the tag “vacation” to data objects stored on the client computer. Similar, relevant data objects may be tagged “vacation_Paris” or “vacation—2005” in a taxonomy on an Internet service. A search on the Internet service for those similar data objects utilizing the user's “vacation” tag will most likely fail to locate those relevant data objects.
In addition, inconsistent taxonomies make it more difficult to share data objects and a data object with a unique tag is less likely to be found by other users. A data object with tags that are consistent with the taxonomy used by an Internet service or a group is much more likely to be located and used by others than a data object with unique tags. Moreover, a given taxonomy becomes more valuable as more data objects are tagged within the given taxonomy. As the number of participants utilizing a particular taxonomy increases, the volume and variety of the data objects retrievable using that taxonomy tends to increase.